Monday, April 30, 2012

I was gazing at the latest issue of Metro, wondering why I had bought it
last week. I have mostly fond memories of working there two decades ago but
nowadays live quietly in the country and am in no way part of the magazine’s target
demographic, having little
interest in Ponsonby Road and none in fashion.
Why on earth did I fork out $9.90? Was it the cover photo starring Shavaughn Ruakere’s
bosom and Colin Madhur-Jaffrey’s cheekbones? Hardly. Was it the strap-on guide
to Auckland restaurants? No. Was it the promised story about “Women’s sex
tourism”? Thrice no.

Then I turned to the books pages and saw
that Paul Litterick has
contributed a review. Yes! That’s why I bought it. Also recommended: Susanna
Andrew on Stephanie Johnson’s new novel The
Open World, and three pages on Emily Perkins and The Forrests. Excellent. I have my $9.90’s worth.

A friend in the sunset industry that is the
print media tells me that media gossip has it that the photo-shoot for the
cover of this issue was a bit fraught. Close inspection reveals… well, see for
yourselves at the supermarket but it seems quite possible, if only on the
evidence of the level of detail of her earrings and his collar, that Ms Ruakere
and Mr Madhur-Jaffrey were photographed separately. The photo credits list the
shoes both are wearing (him: Zambesi; her: Andrea Biani) though no shoes are visible
in the photo. Credit where it’s due, I suppose.

My friend, who like so many of us is baffled
as to what Mr Madhur-Jaffrey does (“What is he good at, exactly?” she asks), reports that last Thursday a certain women’s magazine she works at had some
cupcakes delivered and on top of each one was the image of his face or, as she
put it, “Colin on icing”. It was a promotion for the TV show NZ’s Hottest Home Baker for which the
judges are professional baker Dean
Brettschneider, pudding professional Julia
Crownshaw and. . . model/actor/whatever
Mr Madhur-Jaffrey. You know it makes sense.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

James George, who wrote one of my favourite
New Zealand novels, Hummingbird, on popular
crime fiction – Lee Child, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly etc. Always
good to read a good writer on other good writers.

Keith Kloor, adjunct professor of
journalism at New York University, at Discover
magazine on green
modernism.

Imperator Fish gets
all satirical about the media/blogosphere fuss about David Shearer and
Grant Robertson. Things have come to a pretty pass when MSM writers base their paid
columns on what unpaid bloggers David Farrar, Cameron Slater and Chris Trotter have
claimed, based on who knows what. Looking at you, Audrey.
And you, Vernon.
And you too, Ms
Watkins. Things have come to an even prettier pass
when the only person to talk sense is Jim
Anderton:

“Did you see the polls for Helen Clark?
Labour was 16 per cent and Clark 1 per cent. But some of the people now
predicting Shearer’s demise also predicted Clark’s demise.”

Good to see that Booksellers NZ is having
a think about its Premier Bestsellers promotion. It has been a confusing
exercise, and led to this
wildly erroneous story in the Herald
on 20 March which, to the writer’s credit, was corrected
on 30 March. This must be the nail in the coffin:

Major commercial publishers Random, Penguin
and Hodder are not currently participating in Premier bestsellers.

Hachette’s Kevin Chapmantold The Read “My view is that it was never a
success, and we were half-hearted participants. The important thing would be to
have it heavily promoted. It isn’t known by the public and that makes it less
than ideal.”

The Listener
says, p77 of the current issue, that on Sky tonight, on the ironically titled
channel Movie Greats, at 8:30pm we may view King
Arthur, starring Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffudd and Keira Knightley. The film would
seem not to know its
Woads from its Picts, nor the Listener its Europeans from its other Europeans. The billing reads:

In Romainan-occupied Britain, a cavalry officer
and his men are sent to rescue an important family from invading Saxons.

Friday, April 27, 2012

At last this blog lives up to its billing.
Only two items, but it’s a start.

1. There is another
ruckus over James Joyce. Denis O’Hanlon of Strawberry Beds, Dublin is suing
two other Joyce scholars and the Belgian publisher Brepols, claiming that their
four-volume setJames Joyce: The Finnegans Wake Notebooks
used his exegesis of the 50-odd surviving notebooks in which Joyce wrote random-seeming
words while working on Finnegans Wake.

Mr HC
Earwicker was unavailable for comment, but I found this amazing website
which attempts to explain all the strange wordsin Finnegans Wake. That famous
first sentence:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve
of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back
to Howth Castle and Environs.

2. Here is a sneaky
preview of David Bowie’s new book, Bowie:
Object. It may not survive long online – theft, copyright, lawyers, that sort of
thing – so read it while you can. Money quote:

My fading memories of those sessions are
dominated by images of Eno hunched over the keyboard turning dials by
imperceptible fractions, as amazed and delighted by the sonic textures he was
producing as were Tony V[isconti] and myself.

“Do you know it has a logarithmic one
volt-per-octave pitch control and a separate pulse-triggering signal?” said
Eno, breathlessly.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Regular readers will
know that this blog is fond
of Friesians. My attention was caught by this headline:

Forest Service Considers Blowing Up Frozen
Cows That Died Inside Of A Colo[rado] Mountain Cabin

US English is different, isn’t it, with its
“inside of” and all. The story begins:

It may take explosives to dislodge a group
of cows that wandered into an old ranger cabin high in the Rocky Mountains,
then died and froze solid when they couldn’t get out.

The carcasses were discovered by two Air
Force Academy cadets when they snow-shoed up to the cabin in late March.
Rangers believe the animals sought shelter during a snowstorm and got stuck and
weren’t smart enough to find their way out.

IQist! Later:

U.S. Forest Service spokesman Steve Segin
said Tuesday they need to decide quickly how to get rid of the carcasses.

“Obviously, time is of the essence because
we don’t want them defrosting,” Segin said.

My definition of a great song is something
others want to sing, in the bath, at football, in the playground; one that nags
you all day; one that continues to intrigue through an odd chord change, a
crystal-clear image, a catchphrase that enters the language – or a cliché that
finally gains substance when put to a melody: “your guess as good as mine”,
“you always take the weather with you” …

Indeed.

And now for something completely different:
we have all heard about crowd-sourcing and cloud-computing but, via Tim Blair, here
comes crab-computing.

Finally, this story via Paul Litterick about the NSW police in strife again. Apparently it is “the fifth largest
police force in the world” which I find hard to believe but the ABC should
know. Money quote:

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

We have seen that Australia
is big, and we all know that Africa is very big. I hadn’t appreciated just
how big until I saw this,
which shows that it is bigger than China, India, Europe, the US and Japan
combined – with room left over for Mexico,
Peru, Papua New Guinea, Nepal, Bangladesh, the UK and New Zealand:

Monday, April 23, 2012

A couple of months ago our friend Jenny came
to stay for the weekend bearing pomelos. It’s
a Chinese New Year thing. She made a wonderful salad with them for the
Saturday lunch.

I took Eight with me to the supermarket the
other day. She spotted pomelos and insisted I buy one. Tonight she and Ten
requested, i.e. demanded, pomelo salad for the Monday dinner.

I couldn’t remember what Jenny had done but
improvised with some Drunken
Woman lettuce from the garden; peanuts I dry-roasted in the wok; coconut
threads; dried shrimp; a mix of fish sauce, lime juice (from the garden) and
palm sugar (not the good stuff – that is reserved for the parents) and a little
chilli. They loved it and want it again tomorrow.

We moved from Auckland to the country so the
children would not grow up too fast and become too sophisticated. Fat chance. Thanks, Jenny.

Today is Shakespeare’s birthday (and
deathday). It is also St
George’s Day.

So here is Sam Brown (who was born in Stratford, as it happens) with a joyous performance of George Harrison’s
last song, “Horse to the Water”, which he recorded in October 2001, shortly
before he died. The clip comes from the DVD Concert for George. Also contains Eric Clapton and Albert Lee on guitar,
Katie Kissoon (left) and Tessa Niles (right) on stellar backing vocals, Jools
Holland and Chris Stainton on piano, Andy Fairweather Low on guitar and stellar
backing vocals, and a bunch of others performing Harrisongs at a memorial
concert in the Albert Hall. Not shown (they appear later) are Tom Petty, Monty Python, Ringo Starr on drums
and Paul McCartney on ukulele. It was quite a send-off.

So why shouldn’t I? Posting
clips of the late great Levon
Helm, that is. Here, to show why he was so revered, is him performing the
Band’s “Ophelia” in the PBS show Levon
Helm: Ramble At The Ryman which screened in August 2009. He would have been
68 or so. Astonishing – and what a great horn section.

As ever, Mick
Hartley got there first and provides some good links as well as a magic clip of the Band in 1969 or so
rehearsing “Up on Cripple Creek”. The vocal blend of Helm, pianist Richard
Manuel and bassist Rick Danko is, well, magic.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Possibly. It’s in The Times so is behind the Great Paywall of Murdoch, but
fortunately The Week has summarised the story in
its 14 April issue:

During the Falklands war, [Mick Fellows] was
a member of a team of Royal Navy divers summoned to deal with a 1000 lb
unexploded bomb that had hit HMS Antrim.
With the ship coming under attack from the air, he used a secure line to call
colleagues in the UK for help. All they could suggest was that he keep the bomb
level, and that perhaps they should notify his wife as to the situation he was
in. In response to the latter idea, Fellows unleashed a torrent of profanities.

“What I didn’t know was that this whole
conversation was being broadcast to the Cabinet Room, where Margaret Thatcher
was listening,” he recalls. Later – having succeeded in saving the ship – he
was invited to meet the PM. “She said she wanted to meet the angry man. She
told me that she had heard a lot of swearing when she worked in her father’s
grocery, but said, ‘You still taught me some words I didn’t know’.”

She showed him a map of the Falklands that was under
the Cabinet Room table, and asked him to point out where Antrim had been. And then, he says, “the Prime Minister kissed me
on the lips. I stood up so quick, I hit my head on the table. She said to me: ‘Ever
since I was a girl, I’ve always wanted to kiss a sailor’.”

The number of digital subscribers to The Times already exceeds the daily
circulation of the Independent.

Nearly a quarter of Americans use mobile
devices to get news.

Since 2008, newspapers have lost more than
£1 billion in classifieds, much of it from the regional press, and the analyst
Claire Enders estimates that 40 per cent of the jobs in regional journalism
have gone in five years.

In the United States, the number of daily
newspapers has dropped from 1611 in 1990 to about 1350. In Europe, newspapers
are faring better: circulations are dropping at about 4 per cent a year, half
the rate of national papers in Britain.

one of my former piano teachers has just
made an unnamed appearance [. . .]: Adele Marcus who, so overcome by nerves
just before the Schumann concerto’s whiplash orchestral E and the piano’s
zigzagging chords which simply ask to be smudged (and forgotten), vomited on to
the keyboard. [. . .] The author observes:

“Vomit on the keyboard – that image
symbolizes, for me, the always possible danger of the body speaking up for its
own rights, against the stringent demands of the mind’s wish to construct a
plausible, attractive, laudable self for other people to admire.”

Last week Jillian Ewart wrote
at Booksellers NZ about how delayed release dates for New Zealand frustrate
booksellers. This has been going on a long time but is worse now because we can
all see online which books have been published and we want NOW. This week she reports on booksellers’
responses to that article. All writersshould read this: the book trade is harder than it looks.

It’s not for nothing that until recently
you could declare bribes to foreigners as a tax allowable expense in your
company tax return: bribes to anyone at home meant jail.

The Atlantic
reports that amount of data we have on our universe is doubling
every year thanks to big telescopes and better light detectors.

A new word to me: gerundive. There is an explanation
here,
from the Iconoclast, who quotes Dot Wordsworth in the Spectator a while back:

A creature so rare that its existence had
been discountenanced has been discovered in South Africa. The creature is the
English gerundive, a relative of the extinct Latin gerundive, and its
discoverer is Jean Branford, the respected editor of A Dictionary of South
African English. I had never believed in the existence of the English gerundive
until now. Just to place it in its habitat, let us remember that:

2.The gerund (Latin amandum) is a verbal noun, active in meaning, as with
reading – ‘reading occupies Charles’ (where reading acts as a subject);
‘reading law journals occupies Charles’ (where the noun phrase is the subject
of the sentence, and reading takes an object, law journals, in the
noun-phrase); ‘Charles enjoys reading’, where the gerund functions as an
object.

It is translated as ‘fit to be loved’, ‘fit
to be read’, or ‘lovable’.

The Iconoclast ends by asserting that
“scratching post” is a gerundive” but “whipping post” is a mere gerund.

So here is Frank Zappa in 1984 with Bobby
Martin on killer vocals and keyboards, Alan Zavod on keyboards, Chad Wackerman
on drums, Scott Thunes on bass, Ray White and Ike Willis on rhythm guitar and
vocals, and Zappa on intense guitar. During
a 1974 concert in Helsinki, in the brief silence after the abstract piece “Building
a Girl” (if the album is an accurate representation of the concert, which it won’t be), a drunk in
the audience called out for “Whipping Post”, an Allman Brothers rock-blues. “OK, just a second.” Zappa
conferred with the band. “Oh sorry, we don’t know that one. Anything else?” Incomprehensible
reply from the drunk. Zappa: “Hum me a few bars of it, please. Just show me how it
goes, please. Just sing me ‘Whipping Post’ and then maybe we’ll play it with
you.” The drunk got two or three notes out before Zappa interrupted: “Judging
from the way you sang it, it must be a John Cage composition, right?” Hilarity
ensued – but later Zappa decided to arrange the song for his next line-up which
had in Bobby Martin a member who could sing the hell out of it – and this is the result. The DVD it is from is
called Does Humour Belong in Music? but the soloist is not joking at all. This is worth watching in full-screen mode with the volume cranked up:

Thursday, April 19, 2012

On 2 April I blogged that applications were
open for the very generous CLL 2012
Writers’ Awards, $35,000 each for two serious non-fiction projects. This unleashed
a torrent of comments (i.e. one from Keri Hulme ) about CLL’s payments to
authors out of its revenues from photocopying licences. I hope I managed to
clear various misconceptions up in the ensuing energetic discussion but there
was a later comment from Bill Manhire that is worth bringing up to the front
page, as it were, for further discussion. What he said was news to me:

One problem with CLL and anthologies like the
proposed AUP one is that payment for work copied is made, not to the particular
contributor, but to the anthology editor. This is administratively convenient,
but manifestly unjust – especially given the number of secondary and tertiary
institutions that compile handouts and course readers from the pages of
published anthologies. It’s especially bad news for NZ poets.

As always, Bill is quite right. It is
unfair. (It also explains why I received a payment – it would have been for one
of the short-story anthologies I edited with Graeme Lay though I have no idea
which, because the publisher didn’t pass on that information.) It is easy for
CLL or whichever RRO (reproduction rights organisation
– this is an acronym-intensive business) is handling the
licensing and apportioning revenues to identify the editors because their names
are recorded in the metadata: the names of the authors are not. It would be a
huge job to get this information: as I observed earlier, “Perfect sampling
would be so expensive that there would be no money left over for authors or
publishers.”

In my case the cheque I received was around
$20-30; Graeme would have received the same, so let’s say there was $60 to
distribute. The book was most likely Home,
published in 2005. It contained 100 short stories. Assuming that CLL could get
a copy and track down all the writers, each one would have been entitled to a
payment of 60 cents. The process would have cost hundreds of dollars. Cui bono? There
may be a way around this but no one anywhere in the world has figured it out yet.

I was in the CLL office last week talking
with its dynamic new (since mid-2010) CEO Paula Browning. She said her next
meeting was with a certain major publisher about whether they might consider telling
authors which books have contributed to their CLL payment.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Jane Mayer writes
in her brief New Yorker obit of
Christopher Hitchens:

On assignment in Palm Beach, Hitchens
scored an invitation to dine at the town’s most exclusive, and allegedly
anti-Semitic, country club. [. . . ] Surrounded by billionaires politely
nibbling at Crab Louis with their families, Hitch was presented with the
establishment’s menu. There was a pause, as he scanned the entries. Then, at a
volume designed to be heard on all eighteen holes of the adjoining golf course,
Hitch handed back the menu to the waiter and boomed, “This won’t do. I NEED THE
KOSHER MENU!”

After the ensuing commotion, the member who
had hosted Hitch was suspended, and a new club-house rule was passed: added to
the list of social taboos from that day on was an absolute ban on journalists.

What is surprising is that the mood of
catastrophe prevails especially in the West, as if it were particular to
privileged peoples.

It wouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has read
Norman Cohn’s greatThe Pursuit of the Millennium:
revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages, which
is one of the best books I have ever read.

Chris Bell, who is both author and techsmart, generously shares his knowledge about publishing
e-books. There are people who charge for this stuff, and Chris is better.

Brilliant cartoon from XKCD showing real lakes and ocean depths. Fascinating, and worth
exploring for the hidden jokes and for the “Russians are awesome” line about the Kola borehole.

Brian Sewell is an English art critic of a
certain age and a
certain disposition. My painter friends will be horrified by my confession
that I have always enjoyed his writing. I did know that he spoke in the most affected
accent ever, one that makes the Queen sound common, but had no means of sharing
this. Until
now. Don’t miss the second
page. Click fast enough on different links and you get a wonderful sequence
that makes as much sense as most contemporary art criticism. Try his “Liverpool” and “Hungarian
art”. Then “White eunuch” and “Sliced cucumber”, in that order.

Finally, a writer’s worst nightmare:
English author and Private Eye
journalist Francis Wheen has lost his library
of 5000 books, his CDs, his old vinyl, letters from friends such as Christopher
Hitchens and his work in progress, the novel he has been writing for the last
year, all because his
shed blew up. He was laid low last year with a bad back so this piles Pelion on Ossa
(Virgil has it the
other way round [at 276]) but Wheen
is philosophical about it:

Now, in the absence of books or records to
entertain himself, he would simply “sit in the lotus position and contemplate
the four noble truths”.

Despite apparently remaining upbeat, Mr
Wheen, 55, admitted that the past few months had been difficult. He is
currently suffering from spinal problems and was laid low with a “ghastly virus”
on Saturday which left him “throwing up all over the place”.

“I’m going to read the Book of Job to find
out what happens next,” he said. “Is it the plague of locusts? Or will I have
my camels and oxen taken from me?”

I won’t quote from his Facebook page because we
all know how private FB is, but his responses to condolences from friends and
strangers have been lovely. Grace under pressure, in extremis. You can hear him
talk about it all here
on BBC4. On a more positive note he is also in the Guardian being amusing about modern delusions.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Vicki Anderson of the Press apologises for offending
members of the furry community. She had interviewed some people who wore furry
costumes but who were not, in fact, furries. A genuine furry explains:

The majority of us are just ordinary people
who like to put on costumes and perform.The biggest misconception is that it is all about sex and wild parties.

Not a misconception I have laboured under,
for I have never heard of these people. But it is a complex community with
delicate gradations:

He added that of those who identified as
furries, only around 30% were fursuiters.

Complex, but leading blameless lives:

“Like myself, the others depicted in the
photographs were upset to hear that they were insinuated to be part of the
fetish crowd when that is not what we do. [. . .]

“We do a lot of work with children and are
carefully vetted. Anything like this can be very damaging to our reputations
and livelihood.”

So here is Furry Lewis
(1893–1981) with “When I Lay My Burden Down” in about 1972. He has an unusual
technique – brilliant right hand but, at about 3:00 minutes in, see how he uses
his left elbow:

Alternatively, here is John Cale, who can simultaneously play the viola and sing, performing “Venus in
Furs”:

Monday, April 16, 2012

The research company Roy Morgan has published
its readership estimates for New Zealand magazines and newspapers for the 12
months to January 2012. There is some good news and a lot of very bad news.

First, the good news. Some provincial
newspapers are doing well. The Bay of
Plenty Times is up 12% (all figures here are
my calculations from the raw numbers and are rounded), the Ashburton Guardian is up 14% and the Manawatu Standard is up 15%. Among
magazines, Cuisine and Dish are up 16%, NZ Geographic is up 9% and the Listener
is up 3%. Three per cent may not sound like much – but it is when you consider
the bad news elsewhere.

Let’s consider the bad news elsewhere.

The teenage-girl market is done for: Crème is down 19%, Girlfriend 26% and Dolly 48%. Hard to see the latter surviving. I wonder how much of this is due to
social media, with teenage and tweenage girls spending so much time txting, tweeting
and Facebooking that there is no time left for consuming magazines, which are so
last century. And where teenage girls lead, the rest of us may well follow.

Computing magazines haven’t performed much better:
NetGuide is down 9% and PC World 38%. Hard to see that one surviving
either – it has lost its reason to live.

National
Business Review is down 16%; Bride & Groom is down 19%; and over at ACP, North & South is down 12% and Metro is down 16%.

In the hard-fought women’s weekly market Woman’s Day is down 5%, New Idea 3% and the Woman’s Weekly 2% – these losses are, relatively speaking, drops
in a bucket.

Readership is not the
whole picture – all these results have to be read alongside shop sales,
subscriptions and advertising ratios to get an idea of the health of each title, but
I can’t be bothered doing that research for free. I wish someone who is paid to
be a media commentator would.

A final point: several
of these magazines have been bleeding readership for years so these
losses come after a string of other losses. Big publishers can carry a
struggler; smaller ones can’t. And even big publishers will lose patience
eventually. Ultimately they depend on media buyers in ad agencies and, like
policemen, media buyers get younger every year: they have no loyalty to or
sentimentality about former stars. What counts is today’s performance. Under
the impact of social media and the Internet generally some niches and titles will survive
and thrive, and those now limping will collapse and die.

I loved it when I worked there in the 80s
and 90s but I’m so glad I am out of the industry now. So here are Cream from
their 2005 reunion with “I’m So Glad”:

Yesterday we attended the 57th New Zealand
Ploughing Championships, held nearby. Thirty-seven farmers had come from as far
afield (geddit?) as Temuka, Winton, Asburton and Gore to demonstrate their
skill in the conventional (i.e. with a modern tractor), reverse, vintage and
horse ploughing (shown above) categories. Judging ploughing is a serious business,
requiring assessment of the opening split (10 points), crown (20), main
bodywork (40), finish (20), ins and outs (10), general appearance (10) and
straightness (20.

There were displays of agricultural
machinery, both vintage and modern, a parade of vintage fire engines and more.
It was a good demonstration of why the rural life is so unquiet.

There were also new tractors on display.
This is one of the Magnum
series from Case IH. No price was displayed but as you can see you get 4000
FlyBuys points, which gives us a
clue:

Optional extra: a 19th gear. For a
better sense of scale, see below (models: blogger’s own). It is, frankly, awesome.

Friday, April 13, 2012

It’s school holidays so I am solo parenting while my
wife is away mixing with geneticists, IP lawyers and such. So I was stuck at
home today, helping Eight and Ten with their baking. At about 2pm I snapped and said “It’s me time”
and put on the DVD of Janacek’s opera Káta
Kabanová, the one with Karita
Mattila in the title role. Mattila is brave as – Google her, if you wish, in
Richard Strauss’s Salome in which she
appears naked. She is brave here too, and OMG what a beautiful voice. Amazing
staging too:

But I had to explain to Eight and Ten what
the story was about: basically, a married woman has an affair (“What’s an affair,
daddy?”) and chucks herself into the Volga (“Why, daddy?”). We had a suicide in
the whanau last year so they understand the concept but even so, it was a
challenge.

Next up was the DVD
of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with Bryn
Terfel, Renée Fleming and Hei-Kyung Hong. I whimpered
every time Ms Hong appeared and the children demanded to know why Donna Anna was
sad, why Donna Elvira was cross, why Don Attavio was jealous, and whether
Leporello was as bad a man as Don Giovanni. Also, why did women like Don
Giovanni if he was so awful? I couldn’t really explain that – who could?
– and I couldn’t explain why this is perhaps the sexiest scene in opera ever. I was pleased though that they
could tell that throughout the entire opera the Don was lying through his teeth.Girls really ought to
know how bad boys are.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

An excellent
interview with Damon Albarn, who back in the day took loads more and harder
drugs than we knew. The skinny: Blur are back, but not for long, and there will
be no more Gorillaz. And he’s now BFF with Liam Gallagher. WTF?

Joshua Brown says that any social media site/platform that claims it is “committed to protecting your
privacy” is possibly being economical with the truth. Money quote:

And when we say data – we have pictures of
you and your friends and family and kids. We know where you go on vacation,
what political leanings you have, who you pray to, what size clothing you wear,
what you read, which foods you like and what kind of shit you buy at 2 in the
morning from an iPad. We know the movies you rent, the music you download and
we can triangulate your purchases to determine when you might have a baby, get
married or quit your job.

And if we can’t monetize this stuff, you’re
goddamn right we’ll find someone who can. Our millions of subs are warm bodies
to be harvested and advertised to, if we could find a way to stick a cookie up
your ass, believe us, we would do it. Keep clicking.

More
sense from Home Paddock on a Chinese company buying the Crafar farms.
Always good to hear from a farmer. Good comments too from people who know.

This
is disgusting – seriously – and totally NSFW but is a useful example of the
nastiness that nice people on the left will excuse from their side but would
condemn if it came from the other side. My Labour friends think that the
Democrats are lovely, like Labour here; that the Republicans are evil, like
National only more so; and that only right-wing nutters believe that the BBC
has a left-wing bias. Maybe so, but here is a BBC presenter recommending a clip
by a US stand-up comedian about Sarah Palin’s vagina (he doesn’t use that word,
uses the four-letter one) and “retard baby”. Ugly, not funny and impossible to
imagine even the most right-wing shock jock doing something equivalent about,
say, Michelle Obama. Unless Howard Stern has already been there.

“I also love them pretending there’s no
such thing as multi-tiered hierarchies of racial privilege”

Zohra Moosa:

“We were talking about sexism in games and
whether pac man is gender essentialist”

Matt Nolan, an economist, on the
Productivity Commission’s report on housing
affordability. He reckons that “housing affordability has improved over the
last decade” and “when adjusted for quality, rent relative to income has been
declining”.

Julia Jones on crime novelist Margery
Allingham’s dad. Nobody reads him now and probably few still read his
daughter – great though she was – but what’s interesting is his obsession about
the format of the published work. Weirdly pre-echoes today’s concerns about
whether an e-book is really a book. Money quote:

Over the next fifty years until his death
in 1936 he wrote at least ninety-eight identifiably separate serials which were
published at least two hundred and ninety nine times in various formats
(re-print, abridgement, re-write, re-format) in at least fifty-eight different
periodicals or newsagent’s ‘libraries’. The weekly readership of some of these
papers was measured in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. Over the fifty
years of his publishing career Allingham’s words touched the lives of many
working people -- many of them among the most financially impoverished in
society. Yet Allingham did not consider himself to be a ‘proper’ author. To be
a proper author, he told his younger daughter, Joyce, you had to be published
in hard covers.

Finally, Guy Pearce may be an actor but he
is smart and funny and brilliant about Canberra:

If the Concert Programme announcer this
morning is to be believed, on this day in 1689 Henry Purcell’s short opera Dido
and Aeneas was first performed. The text by Nahum Tate was based on an
idea by Virgil.

It was the first great English opera and, much
as I admire Birtwistle
and Adès, its only
real challenger has been Britten’s Peter
Grimes which made its debut in 1945. That’s a long time between
masterpieces.

So here are Sarah Connolly as Dido and Lucy
Crowe as Belinda in the final scene, the aria “When I Am
Laid in Earth”, also known as “Dido’s Lament”. You can see the
classic Janet Baker version from Glyndebourne in 1966 here, but I reckon this, from the Royal
Opera House in 2009, is even finer:
we live in a golden age of opera singing. It’s a long story but here’s the
skinny:Dido has killed
herself because her man done gone, and these are her dying words:

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

A parcel arrives from America. It is
addressed to me. This is exciting and unusual because unlike everyone else in
the household I have not had a birthday for weeks and I do not do TradeMe. I
open it, wondering what could be within. A writer’s
clock, perhaps?

Uh-oh. It is a copy of I’ll Go Home Then, It’s Warm and Has Chairs: the unpublished emails by David Thorne. I ordered it so I would have the copy with the penguin on the cover, as
above, and not the revised
version with cats which came about because Penguin objected to the penguin – see the correspondence here. It is a
wonderful exchange, which Penguin’s copyright lawyer ends by saying, unarguably,
that:

there are any number of alternatives to
Antarctica such as skiing or being in space.

This is Thorne’s second
book: the first one I received as a 2010 Christmas
present from myself. It was the funniest book I have ever read. This will
be possibly the second-funniest book I have ever read so I must not open it
because I am writing my own book, for money, so must not be distracted. Maybe
just the introduction:

[. . .] The only emails I ignore are those sent from New Zealand. The narrow
emotional ledge on which New Zealanders squat may have a grand view but nothing
good can come from communicating with these people.

So here are Fairport Convention in 2009 with
Richard Thompson’s “Meet on the Ledge” with Richard Thompson himself on beret and guitar, not to
mention Linda Thompson, Teddy Thompson, a bunch of other old folkies and the great
Dave Mattacks on drums:

If you prefer your Richard Thompson
straight, as many do, here he is performing
the song solo, acoustic and in Australia.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Over Easter we had
housepests from Ngunguru (readers overseas: don’t worry, many New
Zealanders couldn’t pronounce it either). Not far from our house is Maungatautari Ecological Island,
a bird sanctuary consisting of 2400 hectares of native bush inside a 47-kilometre
fence that keeps out predators such as rats and stoats. As DOC says,
“it is the largest project of this type on mainland New Zealand and possibly in
the world”. Inside the fence, endangered species such as kiwi, takahe and hihi
are safe and can breed. And apart from the nocturnal kiwis, you can see and
hear them all.

So we like to take visitors there. Last
year we took friends from England and saw one takahe waddling through the
bush about five metres away. This year our friends from Northland were treated to the pair
above, who constitute about one per cent of the world’s population of takahe. Fantastic.It’s
probably equivalent to seeing 10 billion pigeons or seagulls at once.

I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help wondering
what they’d taste like. Probably like turkey so one wouldn’t really bother, but
still…

It’s not quite like that in my garden. The Black
Homburg vine produced few luscious clusters, for one thing. Otherwise it’s all
good. Apart from ever-reliable staples
such as lettuce, beetroot, rhubarb etc, currently most productive are chillies(a
dead heat – geddit? – between the serrano, jalapeno and cayenne), raspberries
and passionfruit. Try as I might I can’t think of a way of combining the three
in one dish.

So here is Prince with “Raspberry Beret”
from his 1985 album Around the World in a
Day. Prince won’t let his real videos appear on YouTube so this is the Pop Up
one with annoying visual pop-ups, but even so it is always a pleasure to see
him, and also Lisa Coleman on keyboards and especially Wendy Melvoin on guitar:

Saturday, April 7, 2012

In the 31 March issue of the Spectator theatre reviewer Lloyd Evans
discusses A Walk-on Part: the Fall of New
Labour which is – I am not making this up – a dramatisation of the three
volumes of political diaries byChris Mullin, who was a
minister in Tony Blair’s government. The books are said to be very amusing.

One incident involves his fellow minister Clare Short when her beeper went off
during an audience with the Queen:

Short compounded her embarrassment by
taking the device from her bag and reading the message. ‘Someone important?’
Her Majesty asked.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

It is true that some of the biggest wankers
I have ever met are architects. It is also true that some of my best friends
are architects. One of my architect friends is Malcolm
Walker and this
is his book, his seventh:

I like it very much. It gathers in its 188 pages a
generous selection of cartoons mocking the absurdities of other architects,
mainly from Architecture NZ but also
from Progressive Building, Sunday News and even Interstices. The book costs $50 and is
worth it.

I am proud to say that I published some of
these cartoons. John Walsh, until recently the (outstanding) editor of Architecture NZ, provides an
introduction and an illuminating interview with Malcolm; there is also a foreword
by that other great architectural cartoonist, England’s Louis Hellman.

As John Walsh says, the cartoons “tell a story of
25 years of architecture in New Zealand, of the issues that have come and gone,
and of those that persist and recur”. They are also very, very funny. Several
made me laugh out loud, especially the set of Old Masters at pp 148-9 – very
much an in-joke, but a magnificent one that features, among others, John Blair, Ted McCoy, Chris Kelly, Andrew Patterson, Pete Bossley, Peter Beaven and the irrepressible Michael Thomson. The Crosson Clarke is the cruellest,
but then it is April.

The cartoon below, “Sheilas in
Architecture” (click on it for a bigger version), is from a 1993 issue of Architecture NZ: “Mandy” must be Amanda
Reynolds; “Jane” is possibly Jane Aimer, whom I adore. The book
was designed by Malcolm’s partner Diana Curtis, whom I adore even more. She is the best designer I have ever worked with and has inserted a few jokes of her
own. I don’t mean to shout, but this is a Very Good Book.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

This is for my friend Ian who is a total
petrolhead and turns 50 about now. It is Ry Cooder and band – and what a band.

It’s from the film Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces: Let’s Have A Ball which
Les Blank made at a concert in Santa Cruz on 25 March 1987. It was the end of
the tour and Cooder had turned 40 a week or so earlier. Many clips from the
film (which is not available on DVD, as far as I know) have been posted on
YouTube by mbroders: if you
like this, just click on all Cooder links from mbroders and you’ll probably get
the whole concert.

Monday, April 2, 2012

Copyright Licensing Limited has announced
that applications are open for the CLL 2012 Writers’ Awards. Every year two
writers receive $35,000 each to work on a non-fiction project. Could be
history, could be science, could be biography, could be anything, really, as
long as it is serious.

Recent notable publications by award-winners
include Paul Millar’s No Fretful Sleeper:
a life of Bill Pearson, Martin Edmond’s The
Zone of the Marvellous, Hazel Riseborough’s Shear Hard Work and Peter Wells’s Colenso biography The Hungry Heart.

To apply you must be a New Zealand citizen
or permanent resident, and provide a summary of the work and a sample chapter. Closing
date is Tuesday 26 June. Full details are here.

CLL, a non-profit organisation owned jointly
by the Publishers Association of NZ and the NZ Society of Authors, licenses
educational and other organisations that copy published material and distributes
the income to the works’ authors and publishers. After deduction of operating
costs and a contribution to the CLL Cultural Fund, which pays for these awards,
all licensing revenue is returned to rightsholders. (It’s mostly textbooks but
occasionally even I get a small cheque.)

It’s a very generous award, one of biggest
in New Zealand, so if you have a suitable project you’d be mad not to apply.

In the Dec/Jan issue of the Literary
Review Christopher Andrew, professor of modern and contemporary history
at Corpus Christ College, Cambridge, reviews Robert Service’s new book Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and
the West. He reports that:

In the Hoover Institution Archives at
Stanford University, Service’s main source of new material, he has uncovered
possibly the most preposterously named intelligence officer of the early
twentieth century, Monsieur Faux-pas Bidet…

Isn’t that “of the early twentieth century” an
extraordinary qualification – surely this man was the most preposterously named
intelligence officer, if not person, of all time?

Recently Cady Noland had a piece at
auction. It went for $US6.6 million. It had seven spots on it. We’re
approaching that psychologically important one-million-dollars-per-spot level.

I can’t find any Spots to go long on but here
are the White Stripes with “Black Jack Davy”:

Eclectic as the Stripes were, that is
probably the only song they have in common with the Incredible String Band. Below
is a late version from the ISB in 2003 which is no match for the one on their 1970 album I Looked Up, but
on YouTube we take what we get and are grateful. The song itself is very old, a
Border ballad probably from the early 18th century, and every version is
different, which is what you get with real folk music. I can’t quickly find a
good source of info online that isn’t Wikipedia but apparently Nick Tosches is
very sound in his Country: The Twisted
Roots of Rock ’n’ Roll.